2019: The year of the pile!

Happy 2019! I’ve mentioned this in the previous post, but I’ve been trying to not buy as much warhammer the last few months and it seems to be working. Abaddon is the last model that I finished recently and that marks the absolute end of the chaos miniatures I have in my posession.

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Now that that’s finished I’ve even started digging in to “The Pile”!

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Trust me, this was a lot worse a couple of months ago.

To the trained eye, the pile is actually pretty well organised:

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So far I’m planning to go about this project in the following order:

  • Terrain (Blue pile). Terrain needs to go first. Thanks to all the work I’ve done these last few years I now have a large 40k and a large Heresy army that I can perfectly use for games in their current rulesets. The only reason I never play a game at home is because I lack proper terrain. If I finish this I can not only start playing some awesome games in my own house, but I’ll be able to take better pictures with nicer backgrounds as well.
  • Raven Guard and Sisters of Silence (Purple pile). These are models I’ve bought a long time ago and I’ve had the idea of a RG army with a small allied SoS force for a long time now. If I get the terrain done, finishing off my Ravens and painting up some Sisters will be a great reward for me.
  • Skaven (Orange pile). When my Raven Guard are completely done it will be good to switch gears and start painting up my Skaven again. It’s a lot of work and a lot of it is grinding, but grinding out simple color schemes will likely be a refreshing change after working on the RG and the sisters. I need to paint 80 clanrats, a start collecting pestilens box and a random assortment of old models that either need some TLC or a more permanent storage solution.
  • Eldar (Red pile). I can not paint so many armies in 1 year. My solution for the Eldar is to hand them over to Scar’s Miniature Madness. With all the money I’m not spending on warhammer this year I feel like I can afford to fix 1 problem the expensive way. I’m also really hyped for it. Owning a pro-painted 40k army that complements my chaos and has a totally different playstyle is something I’m really looking forward to.
  • Word Bearers and Militia (Purple again). Even the best plans do not survive contact with the enemy. Even if I somehow manage to get all of the above done before 2019 is done I will finally start working on my remaining Heresy stuff. It’s the project I’m saving for last because I want it to be a passion project. This is going to be the ultimate reward for finishing the other stuff. I will finally get to feel what it’s like to work on a single project without having something else in the back of my head that will need to get done after that. Also, so far, Heresy seems to work the best for me in terms of excitement and motivation. It’s something about the lore aspect and the long term aspect FW seems to have going with it that just really scratches my hobby itch. Hopefully I can start on these this year and actually start buying stuff again in 2020.

 

September + October Hell Part 2

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Right after the Gurash Wars, I threw myself into my entry for the 2018 edition of Armies on Parade. The idea behind the project was to build a display for my homebrew Renegade Chaos Warband: The Shades of Tranquil.

If you go far back enough on this blog you’ll see that this army was started way back in 2010 and 8 years later it’s only gotten bigger and better. It’s been through 3 edition changes and I can honestly say that I’m still proud of how I’ve painted and built the whole thing. That’s basically why I wanted to take Armies on Parade this year and really celebrate how amazing and cool this force is.

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In the end I got the Best Theme award which was nice and I was just really happy to have respectfully finished this project and army.

The next weekend though, I had to reshift my focus completely again as we were going to the Scale Model Challenge again. Before I went there I apparently didn’t have enough hobby on my plate since I spent the friday evening playing an awesome Heresy game against Koen for the campaign (which is still going strong):

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I enjoyed being able to use my Knight for the first time in a heresy game but I unfortunately can’t stand up to rapier batteries and I lost the Knight without it getting into combat at all. The battle was fun though and it was cool to make an appearance in my own campaign for a change.

Next day was time for the SMC!

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So, there you have it. In between all the happenings of the past months I also spent time helping Stephan build and paint this awesome table. Stephan, Dirk and me added our armies on top of it as well as some terrain pieces and to be honest I was really proud again of our achievement.

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Pictured above are me, Stephan and Dirk from left to right. Below is the only mini that I painted especially for the display. I really felt that I needed a cool centerpiece in between Stephan’s stardrake and Dirk’s flying cow. I’m glad I painted it in the end, but I won’t deny that it took a lot more work than I anticipated. Probably because it’s really a mini that you really want to do your best on and can’t leave hanging with a simply ‘ok’ paintjob.

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Now below here are a lot of pictures, but since it’s such a big board I’m going to not care about making this a long post and just show everything.

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With that out of the way I’ll leave this with only a few more cool images from our neighbouring club at the SMC who brought along an INSANE mordheim table:

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The table was so awesome I can’t even explain it properly with just these images. Basically EVERYTHING on the table can be taken apart in floors which means that your mini’s can literally enter and walk around each house in that city. You can even remove entire houses to see what’s underneath. You can even use some of the fucking SEWERS! The witch hunter warband pictured above is my own and I’m really glad I brought them along just so I could have a chance to play on such an amazing table.

Needless to say though, after so much hobby I forced myself to take a break for a while so expect the next post to contain a lot less material, but hopefully a bit more short and sweet stuff. I’m using my break from events and stuff now to get some bits done that I wouldn’t normally have time for and Horned Rat knows I have enough of that stuff lying around, so I won’t be parched for material on this blog just yet.

So until next time and…

Death to the False Emperor!
Glory to the Horned Rat!
Victory or Death!

September + October Hell Part 1

I’ve been so busy with the hobby these past months that I simply didn’t have time to blog about it! So, to make up for lost time I’m going to do a two part summary of all the amazing things that happened this autumn.

First up is the bloodstorm AoS tournament I was prepping for in the last post. Preparations mostly involved painting some characters and an abomination which you can see included in the army shot above. The games themselves were really fun and with a loss, a draw and a win I felt pretty good about my perfomance gamewise.

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The first battle was against the Maggotkin of Nurgle. Basically a lot of trees, daemons, the glottkin and blightkings. Didn’t mind the loss because the battle was pretty fun and my rats held up pretty well despite the power difference in the lists.

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Second battle was against someone who hadn’t played a lot of AoS before, but had a pretty fun Slaves to Darkness list with SLAMBO! of all things in it. It was fun to not worry about strategy too much and just create a bunch of cool combats. It ended up as a draw even though it was an incredible game.

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Last battle was Horde VS Horde against bonesplitters. My opponent was wielding the infamous arrer boys unit of 90 shots a turn, but thanks to my stormfiends coming in from the flank, that unit didn’t quite perform to its full potential. The rest of the battle was just us slamming our lines into eachother and I won in the end mostly because our time was up. Which is kind of what you get when just moving your guys takes 20 minutes per side.

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Next on the agenda was the third Gurash Wars event. Didn’t have to do a lot of painting for it since it was a centurion event at 1500 points, so I could just take some stuff from my larger army and call it a day. The day was still pretty taxing though. Groningen is roughly around 2 hours away from where I live by car. Not really a fan of driving so any day where I spend at least 4 hours simply staring at a road is not an easy day for me. The event itself was pretty damn cool though. Lots of whacky scenarios and crazy happenings thanks to the points of interest system and the warlord progression table.

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First game was against an amazingly painted Emperor’s Children army. Got pasted pretty bad even though my opponent said he was deathly afraid of my plasmagunners and terminators. In the end the terminators proved too slow and the plasma squads were easily taken out by kheres. Got some cool points of interest rolls and some nice warlord bonusses, so that was pretty nice as well.

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Second game against Iron Warriors on a zone mortalis board. The zone mortalis and my infiltrate ability caused this game to become a draw (I think), but we mostly just shot at eachother a bit and tried to keep our stuff from dying too much.

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This game against Thousand Sons was again a draw if I recall correctly. It all looked to be going really well, until my terminators got creamed by too many bolters and my warlord failed to kill a delegatus. On the other side of the table things evened out as my contemptor killed a sorcerer and some castelax, but the game was really fun in the end. Lots of objectives and points of interest claimed for me.

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The last game was a really wierd scenario where the whole game revolved around basically whose warlord could attack the hardest. Luckilly for me my warlord was buffed pretty hard at that point with an extra toughness, extra attack, extra initiative and whatnot, so he proceeded to create so many victory points in the first couple of turns that it didn’t matter that the rest of my army got massacred.

So, that’s it right now for part 1. I’ll try to write up another blog post later this week to post some pictures of the Armies on Parade and Scale Model Challenge events that I went to in october. See you soon!

Summer Break

Time for another short update post!

It’s been about a month since I participated in the Age of Sigmar Bloodstorm event and the amount of time I spent painting has been so off the charts that I’ve had to take a small break from painting and hobby for a while. I played some games here and there, but I’ve deliberately stayed away from my paintbrushes and tend to some of the other aspects of my daily life that I might have left somewhat neglected in my clanrat frenzy. Here’s some shots from one of the few battles that I did play during the past month.

Now that the dust has settled I’m starting to feel energized for the hobby again. Thanks to the new AoS book as well as some old Heresy black library books, I’m probably going to start spending some time painting again. With some luck I’ll be able to expand my growing Skaven force and also put some effort into organising that narrative Horus Heresy campaign I’ve been thinking about for a while now.

Hopefully I’ll have more to say about it in the next post!

120 Clanrats

The reason for the lack of blog posts in the past month is that I had to think of it like this: “If I have time to write a blog post, I have time to paint some clanrats.”

The mentality that I had to be in for the past couple of weeks was insane. In the last post I made on the subject I showed my doomwheel and had just started work on my Stormfiends. So since that post I still had literally one hundred clanrats to paint, a warp lightning cannon, an abomination and 3 stormfiends. I simply had to give up on all of my other free time activities in order to finish it all in time.

In this post though, I’m glad to announce that I did it. Despite having to replace the abomination with 6 jezzails and having to stay up until 3 am the night before the tournament, I managed to paint every single model to a nice tabletop standard.

Here’s some WIP shots of the stormfiends and a picture from the army display at the event itself:

As for the event itself, it was a lot of fun to see so many well painted AoS armies at a Dutch tournament. With 21 players (if I remember correctly) it was the biggest AoS event in the Netherlands so far.

The first game I played was a bye against an amazing Stormcast Eternal army that had been painted to look like weathered statues. It was great fun and because it was a bye game, we both threw competition out the window and focussed on having a fun game with lots of combat.

The second game was against a good friend who also brought his Stormcasts along. This game started out extremely epic with two classic battlelines staring eachother down, but quickly turned into a slaughter. As it appeared I had made some tactical errors with my brand new force, which were compounded by being on the recieving end of a double-turn. The game was still pretty fun despite the one sided result and it gave me some much needed experience.

The third game was against sylvaneth. This game was a lot more balanced casualty-wise as I applied some lessons from the second game and used some pretty effective screening tactics. The scenario and the mobility of the sylvaneth put me at a severe disadvantage however and I lost the game at 2 against 6 vp’s. My opponent was a chill guy though and it was a really fun game. He also obviously put a lot of effort in his painting which was also cool to see.

Once again I can’t overstate how happy I am to have finished my Skaven army finally and being able to use it at the event was the cherry on top. Next post might have some heresy or 40k in it again or perhaps even an abomination?

Glory to The Horned Rat!

The Race is On!

Past few weeks I’ve been spending my hobby time on Skaven again!

I’m participating in the Bloodstorm Age of Sigmar tournament on the 9th of June and I’ll need a 2000 points army to do it. So far my little Skaven horde has not really taken off and I’m about a 100 clanrats short of a solid battleline.

Since I’ve been mentioning a necessity for painted Skaven, Dirk was so amazing as to help me out with an awesome Arch-Warlock for my birthday:

I only needed to spend a little time repainting the base and this bad-ass was good to go! Squeeking of going: The first thing on the list of stuff to get ready was a model that’s been haunting me for over 5 years.

This was a chore to paint, but I’m oh so glad I finally got it done. Finishing a model that you’ve been dreading in, like, forever is an amazing feeling and sometimes very necessary to regain confidence in an army project.

The next things on the table are 3 stormfiends and after that it’s clanrats, clanrats, clanrats. I wasn’t lying that I’d need to do a 100 if I want a solid battleline so despite that being a daunting number, I’m going to have to give it an honest go.

I’m also playing and participating in a narrative 40k campaign that I’ve started to write some fiction for. I’m not sure if I want to post the fiction as a part of this blog or create a full seperate blog for it.

I’ll update this post as soon as I’ve figured it out.

Glory to the Horned Rat!

2018 So far

Finally, we’re catching up here on the new blog!

In this post I’ll spend some time discussing the stuff I’ve been up to in 2018. It’s actually been quite a busy year so far. In fact, it’s been so busy I’m attempting to take things a little easier this summer and not be swamped with events and painting deadlines every week or so.

Speaking of events: my 2018 started off in preparation for the Horus Heresy Bloodstorm tournament. This event was convieniently held at my local game store and with only 2 unpainted Raven Guard models left, I tried to bring both of them to the tournament. In the end I was only succesful in finishing my Land Raider Proteus in time (pictured below). Corax took longer than I expected and I wanted to do the primarch of my legion justice and decided against rushing him for the sake of an event.

The bloodstorm events, by the way, are worth mentioning in this blog for the amazing tables and scenery alone. Every table was provided with a gaming mat from gamemat.eu and tournament scenery from Wargames Tournaments painted by Peter from Scar’s Miniature Madness. Everything looked amazing and to me, that almost automatically makes for some awesome games. As for the actual games: I played three that day.

First one against Night Lords was a great game against a cool dude. I had a lot of trouble in that game due to bad dice rolling (failing a lot of reserve rolls and night fighting rolls) as well as my inexperience with Night Lords as a legion.

Second game was against a cool looking mechanicum force, but the fact that it had a Porphyrion made it an incredible struggle for me to fight against. The only defense I had against super heavies were my 5 man melta squads in drop pods, but my opponent had castled his Knight up to such a degree that there was simply no way to get close enough. In the end I whiffed the only melta salvo that I was able to get off and was forced to watch the rest of my army get relentlessly bombarded with templates until it was gone. At least this was a short game.

The third game was against mechanicum (Again!), but this time the player had a much nicer list and I had seen the guy before at the Armies on Parade competition. This was probably the most fun as I actually had somewhat of a chance at winning for a while. In the final turns I was in a pretty good position to grab some vital objectives. However, as fate would have it, I whiffed some crucial run and save rolls, leaving me on the short end of a close victory point tally.

The next few weeks were spent painting Corax and thereby finally finishing the last of my Raven Guard models. I am super proud on how he turned out and can honestly say that it’s the best model I’ve ever painted. Also, with Corax done, I felt like a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders as I did not have a single unfinished Raven Guard model on my shelf since at least 2 years. On to new projects!

The next few months saw me playing some more AoS with my fledgling Skaven force as more people in the store got interested in the game and I let myself get caught up in the Malign Portents hype by building and painting a Darkoath Warqueen:

I really love this model and it was a lot of fun to not paint a space marine for once. She did very well on her first outing as well. Putting down an opposing Skaven Warlord right before staring down a Stormfiend and keeping it occupied for a good while.

The next thing on the agenda was the “Impact” miniature wargaming event which was also held in my home city.

Above you can see our display stand as it we set it up for the convention and below is a piece of background that I wrote the night before, along with some detail shots of the table itself. I’m really happy that I was able to rely on Peter being there with his Iron Warriors as well as Joyce and Dirk for being able to lend their armies to the cause. Compared to the Scale Model Challenge there were a bunch of people who couldn’t make it this time, but I’m glad we were still able to put on a good showing.

Impact itself was a really cool convention and although it was relatively small compared to the SMC, it seems to be growing each year and where the SMC was more of a miniature painting convention, this one was more focussed on the gaming aspect. For next year it’s likely we won’t be taking a display to Impact and try to arrange a more interactive presence instead.

After Impact I kept busy preparing for 2 other insanely cool events. Both planned together in the same weekend; I was fully aware that it was going to be incredibly exhausting, but probably worth it.

The first event was a second Bloodstorm tournament. 40k this time and I took a revamped Chaos list as a last ditch attempt to get the army working.

1st game was against Blood Angels. A fun game against a fairly balanced BA list. I made a bunch of mistakes that cost me a lot, but that’s down to my inexperience with the game. I felt like I could’ve won if I did some other things differently. The Knight pulled off some amazing stunts that game.

The second game was against another Chaos army that looked very nice and different at the start, but turned out to be a bit gamey in the end. His list was set up to (ab)use as much of the shooting of his Rubric Marines and Obliterators as possible, which resulted in some unfluffy choices IMO, but fair ‘nuff. At least when the good old 40k tournament mentality reared it’s ugly head that day it could’ve been a lot worse.

The final game was against the Imperial Fists of Rob (who I see regularly at the GameForce). Despite seeing eachother almost every friday we’ve never played a game of 40k. This was the most fun game of the day and also the closest. Rob’s army is by nature a bit of a gunline, but I had fun butting my head against it and despite Rob focussing all his shooting on my Knight in the first turn, the rest of my army made good progress and thanks to some lucky maelstrom objective cards and my army’s good maneuverability Rob was only able to outscore me by a single victory point.

I was also really happy to take home the award for Most Sporting Player. Really happy with it and also that, despite losing all my games (again), I came close on a couple of occasions and the addition of a Knight as well as having some retooled units really amped up the power level of my army. Against casual opponents I might even be able to win some games (if I practice the rules a bit more).

The next day and the final event of 2018 so far was the second Gurash Wars event.

It was fun to meet the guys from Groningen again. I absolutely love the fact that they’re so dedicated to organising true narrative Heresy events. The best thing about the Horus Heresy is the fact that you get to imagine your army in these massive war scenarios and that is exactly what I was getting with the Gurash Wars.

First game was against Sons of Horus. It was a short game due to the scenario being a bit stacked against me. I was allowed to bring fortifications but they didn’t help against the free bombardment that the traitors were given before the game began. I felt relieved that I was able to cause some damage regardless and though I lost the game resoundly, I didn’t leave my opponent unbloodied.

The second game was against an amazing massed assault of World Eaters. It was really fluffy to play against a massed line of berzerkers doing nothing but running and assaulting and screaming like madmen. I’m glad I took the time to be a bit more careful with my model placement this battle. This paid off pretty nicely as I managed to force at least one unit of World Eaters to retreat in the face of rapid firing Ravens. I forget if I lost this game or if it was a draw on scenario points, but I definately felt wiped.

The last game was against Thousand Sons. There were a lot of Sehkmet Terminators deepstriking on the table, so I was prepared for the worst, but due to some succesful maneuvering and a lucky fight between my Contemptor and a Thousand Sons Praetor I was actually able to pull out a win on the objective! It was also good to see the loyalists win a Gurash Wars event for once and I was also very surprised and grateful to win the Best Painted Model award for my Raven Guard Praetor.

So, that’s all for 2018 so far. Next post will contain more of the stuff I’m working on currently and I’ll hopefully be able to stop writing these massive summarised posts and actually go into some detail again.

If you’ve been reading all of this rambling so far: Impressive! Kudos to you! These last 3 posts are no doubt the longest I’ve posted so far. Until next time!

Victory or Death!

Season of War

Long time no post yet again!

Fret not though my dear imaginary readership: the lack in blog updates the past few months has only been surpassed by the incredible progress that has been made on all my projects.
There’s so much to show that I’m going to spread this stuff out over two posts. This one is going to cover all the AoS games I’ve been playing over the summer.

Despite a lot of anti-AoS sentiments at the local store, I got asked by the owner to run GW’s Season of War campaign for whomever was interested. I got the campaign box and the generals handbook and basically spent five consecutive fridays focussed on promoting Age of Sigmar at the store.

All things considered, the campaign was actually a really fun experience! I’m impressed with how GW handled things, seeing as I had a somewhat sour after taste with Storm of Chaos and the Nemesis Crown. AoS also seems a lot more suited to global campaigning than the old world ever was. The campaign was also fun because it unexpectedly got some new people excited for AoS again. A long time friend of mine got back into things with the Death alliance, another local guy went along with Seraphon, another Skaven player joined in a couple of times and me and Joyce with our Skaven and Sylvaneth were there as well.

Here are some of the best pics we shot during the course of the campaign:


First battle of the campaign was between two of my friends who had only recently decided to give AoS a try. Lizardmen VS Empire took some getting used to with the new system, but both players ended up having a great time.

 
The Empire player from the first shot wanted to try out AoS against something else than Lizards, so I obliged by fielding my budding Skaven force.


My custom-made Hell Pit Abomination got stuck in pretty quick.

 
The next week we did a 2 VS 2 battle with Skaven + Sylvaneth VS Seraphon + Dark Elves.

 
The Dark Elf + Seraphon side looked nicely ranked.

 
This was one of the first battles Joyce (Sylvaneth) had ever fought with a treelord and perhaps teleported towards the opposing armies a bit too soon. All in all it was a fun battle and mainly served to show how deadly a shooty force could be.

 
Another week another battle. This one was a 4 player free for all and shows my rats marching towards Death, Seraphon and another Skaven army.

 
The Empire guy from the first pictures is actually the one who started up this new Death Alliance army during the course of the campaign. I played against him a bunch of times to get him started with the game.

 
He got started with the Get Started set for the deathrattle faction. I will say this: Neferata is so far the nastiest thing I have faced in Age of Sigmar.

 
We closed off the campaign with a 3 player free for all, which ended once again in favor of our local Death player, who wisely kept back while the Sylvaneth threw themselves against my rats en masse.

So, that’s about it for this post. Next post I’ll post up some reports of the matches I did for our ongoing Horus Heresy campaign this summer.

Glory to the Horned Rat!

In with the old, in with the new!

It’s been almost two weeks since the last post and this is mostly because I accidentally my old laptop. I have a new one now so everything is a-ok again and that means it’s time for a new post!

I took some time off from work as well these weeks, so besides relaxing, I managed to do quite a bit of work on both Clan Thikket and the Dust Vultures.

Clan Thikket has grown considerably from the lone clanrat I posted last time and is joined by 4 of his mates as well as a freshly painted Warlock Engineer and two Doom-flayer Weapon Teams. Next on the list for new paint things are the rest of the clanrats and a doomwheel.

It’s been so long since I painted anything fantasy I almost forgot about command groups.

This model gets the award for ‘most rewarding to paint’ this week.

These two were really tough to paint. Too many random things I had trouble identifying and I had to glue and paint the giant wheels on seperately. I make it a point to always assemble something completely before I paint it, but this time there was really no way around it.

I also took the time to rebase two models I had left over from my old Skaven army: A Master Moulder and a Hell Pit Abomination. Both of these are heavily converted and were staples of my old Skaven force so it feels good to see them on new bases, ready for action again. It’s also nice to have these two make up a small moulder theme to go along with my skryre and verminous guys.

Don’t know if I ever posted these on this blog, but they’re some golden oldies for sure.

Already posted these last time, but I changed the basing a little and they’re officially Moulder now in AoS I found.

For the Dust Vultures I painted up a small support squad of plasma gunners. These are to arrive via a Drop Pod that I still hope to finish painting this month.

This pic was made with infinitely better lighting at GameForce.

I used them right away in a battle for the 30k campaign this friday against Michiel’s Mechanicum army. The game was a total massacre. I didn’t have a single thing left by the end of turn 4. Most of this has to do with the mission, which was a break through style thing where I had to run a table length in order to score objective points. Unfortunately, running all out all the time against an army that’s perfectly capable of decimating your squads with a couple of standard troop volleys, is not such a great thing to be required to do in a game of 30k. It was interesting though to see the mechanicum in action and next time I hope I don’t have to play a mission like this against them again.


This is how things were after my turn 1.


Close up shot of the new guys in action.

So, lots of pics this time, but that’s ok. Hopefully next post will have a finished drop pod and some progress on some new raven guard stuff for the 1250 point mark of the campaign.

Victory or Death!

Raven Guard Wins and Clan Thikket!

Suddenly, out of nothing, I seem to be totally on the ball with the hobby again.

First thing I did this week was go out of my way to paint this experiential revelation:


Perfection.


“The other side.”

Please, please, please people! Don’t all pull down your pants at once! This is but the first of the gimongous Skaven army that is currently in the works and shall soon flood like a swarming tide the great gaming tables of the known world!

In all seriousness, I’m really glad I got this out of my system. I’ve been putting off painting a clanrat because I wasn’t sure about it tying me down on a colour scheme, I wasn’t sure how to do fur right and I didn’t have a plan for the skin either, and all sorts of silly excuses. I finally did it and it was amazing fun. I’m happy with my choice to go for a dark green with blue accent and although the skin took me a couple of tries, I’m really happy with the end result. The base is not done yet obviously and I plan to add some high summer grass tufts to get a sort of ‘forest’ look for my rats. Asuming I’m going on with the dark green/forest rat theme I’ve also decided on a name for the clan: Clan Thikket. Maybe it sound dumb but somehow this is the stuff that get’s me inspired for an army.

Then, on friday, I finally had the 750 points battle for the ongoing Horus Heresy campaign and boy was it a good one. I was playing against Michael who had a combination of Blood and Dark Angels but was using them as Iron Warriors (because there weren’t enough traitor armies in the campaign). He had 6 special terminators with cyclone launchers, a unit of 20 marines and a unit of dakka predators. I had a land speeder with multi melta and grav gun, a close combat contemptor, 2 units of marines and a chaplain. We had to claim objectives and were under raging inferno rules which meant we each had a 40mm, 3d6 scattering, S5 within 6″ inferno bomb to drop on eachother. These rules were insane and almost all casualties suffered were due to inferno hits.

Turn one had me infiltrating and advancing in an attempt to go for the throat. This plan immediately backfired when one of the inferno bombs landed right in front of my path.

Due to the nature and 40mm + 6″ radius of the inferno templates (we used Naut’s half-painted terminators), both our plans fell apart quite fast and by turn 5 we were reduced to simply trying to claim an objective and stay alive with the models we had left.

One of the last turns my second squad had arrived from outflank in turn 3 to claim an objective while the first squad was reduced to the chaplain and the sergeant. Contemptor was long gone and the land speeder arrived in turn 4.

In the end we both managed to hold on to two objectives and it came down to the special victory conditions. Due to my chaplain and sergeant surviving and managing to wreck his tanks, Michael only had First Blood, while I could claim Last Man Standing and Slay The Warlord. Basically pulling this victory right out of my ass on the last turn. It was a great game though and every dice roll we made felt like a make or break situation. Battles like these make me curious to see what’s going to happen at the 1000 point level. Winning this battle was pretty critical as well because a loss for me would have meant that this round would have went to the traitor side. 750 is now the first time the loyalists came out ahead which was nice to see for a change.

So, that’s about it for this week. Now on to the next batch of rats and ravens!

Victory or Death!